Sue Perry's Blog: Required Writing, page 11

Signs Not in Sync

How do I smell the ocean when vehicles drive along the sand? These signs need to talk more. (Admittedly, they are on opposite edges of the United States, but that is a technical detail.)

While we are on the subject, maybe it’s just me – and my sheltered Californian upbringing – but…

Dear Florida, it seems so very wrong to drive on a beach.

 

(left sign: Oxnard, CA; right sign: New Smyrna Beach, Florida)

(The WP Weekly Photo Challenge is to establish a dialogue between two photos.)

Tagged: beach, postaweek, signs, Weekly Photo Challenge

Twenty Free Chapters of Nica!

Nica of Los Angeles publishes as a e-book on Thursday, September 4, 2014. At last!

To celebrate publication, the first twenty chapters – about half of this fantasy detective novel – are available to read for free.

Get started reading!

or

Pre-order at the introductory price of $2.99!

or

Check out the reader reviews!

or

Simply exercise your click finger!

 

Tagged: detective, fantasy, free book chapters, free read, indie authors, Nica of Los Angeles, speculative

A Nine-Way Conversation

My feet don’t often get a chance to talk to each other, because the toes are always gabbing. Well, nine of them, anyway. The right big toe is a pariah – a source of shame, according to the others. But then, as is common among toes, the nine suffer from an excess of conventionality.

 

(This WP Weekly Photo Challenge: juxtapose two photos to create a dialogue between them.)

Tagged: feet, postaweek, toes, Weekly Photo Challenge

BTW, RW is on Bloglovin (oh, and check out this squirrel!)

Ah, the consumer universe. As most of you surely know, there are many places that a person can host a blog, and the blogs on one host aren’t compatible with those of another. So, for example, if you have a WordPress blog you can follow and read other WordPress blogs easily, but that won’t be true for Blogspot… or Blogger … or ….

The now-defunct GoogleReader allowed browser-based compilations. Similarly, if you have a Bloglovin account, you can (mostly) get all your blogs in (mostly) one place, regardless of which platforms birthed them.

If you want to follow Required Writing via Bloglovin, clicking on this link is one way to do so:

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

Putting this link in a post is also a requirement for me to “claim” my blog as belonging to me. See, if I can create a post with a link in it, I must have access to this blog.

Anyway. So this post will not win awards as the most boring post ever, below is a video. The squirrel may have had as much fun making the video as I had watching it. Anyway I like to believe that squirrels, like cats, only do what they want to do.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsuVLsDyln4

Tagged: blogging, bloglovin

When Metal Frays

Everything weathers or wears or frays, each according to its materials. It is such a commonplace process yet produces so many extraordinary results, including the intricate silhouettes of mountain ranges and beach sand that massages your feet as you walk.

I am especially fond of rust, provided it is not my stuff that is doing the rusting. A stairway in the U. Colorado, Boulder, athletic stadium is doing the rusting here. The pooled water is surely causing yet more rust, plus an artful reflection of a railing that was boring in real life:

Nearby, the stairs come with cartoon faces (I promised myself I wouldn’t mention beings from other dimensions again):

And these stairs suggest star nebula images from the Hubble telescope (if you ignore the yellow non-skid tape):

Out in West Hollywood, CA, I’m pretty sure this brand new sidewalk tree root cover is not supposed to be rusting already, but I’m glad that it is!:

This rusting sea wall in Santa Barbara, CA, looks very much like my daughter’s knee after a horrendous scrape, but let’s not talk about that and I will resist the urge to post a comparison photo:

Here is the sea wall with a little more context:

In the low-slung light just before sunset, even a rust hater would have to enjoy this view of the same sea wall:

 

The WP Weekly Photo Challenge is Fray.

Tagged: ocean, photography, postaweek, rust, santa barbara ca, U CO Boulder, Weekly Photo Challenge

Shadow Worlds

Which came first, the idea or my belief in it? I’m not sure. I am deep into writing of the second novel in the FRAMES series, in which seemingly inanimate objects like books and buildings are sentient beings. And – guess what? Everywhere I look I see objects that appear to be more than objects.

Is this a new perspective? Or did I always see things this way but have no reason to think twice about it? Certainly, I’ve always been fascinated by shadows and reflections and silhouettes – their ability to reproduce while distorting, maintaining the familiar within the strange.

Case in point. Below is a staircase banister at the Egyptian Theater, a deco movie palace in Hollywood, CA. In silhouette, the banister’s reptilian underpinnings become apparent. I see a head in profile, facing right. The iris bisects an eye that narrows to a point, into an elongated snout that slopes down and to the right, out of frame…

You see that too, right?

Right?

How about this one? The ocean has carved creatures in this eroded beach wall. You see this furry guy with the long nose, right?:

In this post-apocalyptic sunset, the creatures line up looking frail:

You see them, right?

This WP Weekly Photo Challenge was Silhouettes.

Tagged: beach, creativity, erosion, photography, postaweek, sunset, Weekly Photo Challenge, writing

Pssst! I Want To Share My New Discovery: It’s Called Twitter!

How many times do you have to hear the same advice before you listen? For me, the answer is 17. That’s how many times somebody told me, You’re a writer? You need to be on Twitter or people won’t know about you.

Okay, I made that up. The 17, that is. It could be 12, could be 30. Anyway, I’ve heard it a lot of times. I resisted the advice for years, because I don’t really get Twitter, except it is amazing to watch the flow of tweets during big-deal world events. And it’s a brilliant medium for certain comedians. The 140-character limit is also an intriguing fictional milieu, and I once dabbled in creating multiple accounts for imaginary people so that I could engage them in a story. It was fun, but writing novels remains funner.

Funner is a word my son used, back when he was small. For example, he dictated this message with the shower gift to an unborn child, “At first it’s not fun but then it gets funner and funner.” (It = life.)

But I digress. Just like on Twitter, except with more characters.

As with my children, I want the best for my novels. Especially, I want people to read them. Towards that end, the first – and in the current publishing world, the most difficult – step is to make people aware that my novels exist! So, a week-plus ago, I took the plunge and joined the Twitter universe.

The Twitterverse is a peculiar place that I don’t much understand. I have come to learn that if you like what someone tweets, you can reward them with various coins of the realm. You can favorite the tweet, or re-tweet it, or follow that tweeter. Following someone is a particular honor, apparently, and important. Some people pay for services that reveal who followed – and who un-followed – them every day. What does one do with un-follow information? Beg them to come back? Make a Nixonian enemies list?

My number of followers fluctuates. This happens whether or not I tweet anything. The long-term trend is up so maybe it’s like the stock market. Or perhaps I have offended some, by failing to retweet them, and so they cut me off. More likely, they were false followers, who followed me just to get me to check them out and say hmm, interesting and follow them back… Mission accomplished, they hook another follower and then unfollow her. Me. Apparently this kind of thing is worth the effort because your ratio of followers to following could indicate how cool you are. In even more arcane ways, your number of tweets matter, but I’m not the one to explain how that works.

The unfollowing methodology perplexes me. Should I figure out who unfollowed me and – eye for an eye! – unfollow them? Should I unfollow the #Dalai Lama? What about my musical faves like #Chris Thile or #Noam Pikelny or #X (here Xtheband)? They’ve had more than a week to follow me back, how long am I supposed to wait for respect?

I can’t imagine how much energy it takes to keep track of such things. Twitter is overwhelmingly productive. I don’t follow many people yet, so I don’t get all that many tweets on my timeline. While I typed this, I only got 183 new tweets. Wait, make that 203. The tweets flow by and if I’m not watching the screen when your latest tweet posts, I will never see it. And so tweeters post and post and post, so that I might occasionally see one of their tweets. (Make that 247 new tweets.) Many writers claim that incessant tweeting noticeably boosts sales and downloads of their books. (272 new tweets.) Oy. I hope that is not the only way to grow readership. (292 new tweets)

Conversation seems difficult on Twitter. When you reply to a tweet, you do actually engage with another tweeter, but your timelines shows non-sequitur reply lines that make no sense to anyone else and it takes several clicks to backtrack to understand the conversation. I’m sure no one bothers.

For all of that, Twitter is amazing. Think about it. All over the world, millions upon millions typing and sending these cryptic messages in internet bottles, all day, every day. No need to reply, it’s all one-way. (337 tweets) Sometimes I go bittersweet and pretend that Twitter relays the transmissions from a distant galaxy, messages only just now captured after traveling light years from a civilization lost to a supernova, eons ago.

Do you tweet? My twitter handle is in the snapshot – stop on by! (363 tweets)

P.S. To those of you who have read Nica of Los Angeles – I sound like Nica now, don’t I? It’s kind of awesome and kind of creepy to be inhabited by a character in this way. After I finished book 1, I wasn’t able to shake her style of narration, and now that I’m immersed in book 2 in the series, I’ve stopped trying to shake it because I need it again. Maybe I will become more like Nica, and not just talk like her. Now that would be awesome!

Tagged: humor, Nica of Los Angeles, novels, self-publishing, technology, Twitter, writing

Surely There Is Someone to Sue Over This!

Guess what this is! I’ll give one hint: It is not an heirloom hand-crafted dish:

For more context, here are a couple others of the same species:

Here they are shortly after birth:

What they are: blobs of melted metal. I put a pan of water on the stove to boil for my oatmeal, then messed around on the internet for just a couple minutes, or so it seemed. Clearly I was lured to keep clicking around! I came back to find the pan melting.

I confess that I was tempted – very tempted – to keep the pan on the burner because the melted blobs are smooth and interesting and I want more. I fought my temptation after I envisioned a later stage called pan explosion.

This is not the only pan lid now left bereft. In memorium:

This seems to happen about once every 18 months, and started about the time I started my blog, which is quite a coincidence!

(The WP Weekly Photo Challenge is Texture.)

Tagged: blogging, internet, rabbit_holes, Weekly Photo Challenge

Consumer Nirvana – a short list

All hope abandon, ye who shoppeth here.

Being a consumer makes me anxious and hostile. I go into a store, see shelf after shelf of choices and I don’t revel in having options. I just want to get my laundry soap and get out of here. I become loyal because overwhelmed. I stick with products that slightly work for me because I can’t bear another round of label reading or comparison shopping. Consumer-wise – except for the shortages – I might have done okay in the Soviet Union.

But – there are some times when I glory in being part of a consumer society, when I am enjoying the luxuries that have become necessities because I love them so frigging much. My top two consumer necessities are:

1) the iPad. It captures the essence of all that is charming and easy and cool about Apple products, while allowing me to read and write in the dark, such as on patios on summer nights. I write my first draft novels on my iPad now, and only switch to a laptop because iPad text editing remains at a Neanderthal stage.

2) the automobile seat warmer. Although my last couple cars have had them, it took me years to toggle the on button. The concept seemed weird and pointless, and reminded me of a failed toilet attachment from long ago called “Butt Spa”. Then I tried one (a seat warmer, not a Butt Spa). Now I look forward to driving in frigid weather. And yes, even in southern California it gets cold enough for a seat warmer — if you want it to.

Image from electronicproducts.com.

Tagged: consumerism, iPad, musings, novels, personal attitude, shopping, writing

Is There An App for That?

No, really, I’m asking: does anybody know of a simple, free (ish) niche app to create (writer’s promo) images like this one, which Louise G. White posted on twitter:

Louise used Photoshop, which is awesome, the gold standard, and so forth, but fails both my requirements, being neither simple nor cheap.

Tagged: book promotion, graphics apps, indie authors, marketing, Photoshop, self-publishing